How They Broke Britain

Product Information

His recounting of his corperal punishment as a young boy at boarding school are honestly heartbreaking and it's a very interesting look at how that experience lead him to support the concept of beating children for many years, against what would be thought of as clearly rational and obvious reasons. The complexity of how we protect ourselves emotionally from trauma plays key roles which then inform our lives onwards. I feel a bit bad for O’Brien – his chapter on Andrew Neil and the ushering into the public sphere of shady, opaque groups such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (whose output Neil published while editor of the Sunday Times) was fascinating, not least his explanation of just how intertwined groups such as the Tax Payers’ Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute became – and how easily their spokespeople have been allowed to appear on the BBC and in the press. Could we have spent more time talking about his book? The truth is that, while I enjoyed it, I found it hard to disagree with the many chapters suggesting Johnson, Paul Dacre, Dominic Cummings et al have been malign influences on the country. What interests me more are the conflicts between O’Brien’s radio persona – “the conscience of liberal Britain” – and his actual desire for status-quo-shaking change. I thought How Not To Be Wrong was excellent. I don’t listen to James O’Brien but I enjoyed his previous book, How To Be Right very much and tried this on the strength of it. It’s a very different book, but just as good and just as important. Further still, If you read the book, you can see he is dressing himself up as a changed man, compassionate and appreciative of the poor and being a good father figure to his daughter, as well as never forgetting or disrespecting his parents in his perfect family entity. It is all so contrived and I don't believe a bit of it. It is almost bizarre when he describes himself as a war like alpha male and suggests he had to change to be the compassionate person he is – again he is trying to dress himself up – parading to the crowd*AGAIN* – it is PATHETIC. The book works on the mistakes of the Conservative government and there are some good points to debate here but it’s all a little one way and predictable. I was disappointed.

I’ve certainly held views in the past that I am now ashamed of and the thought of doing what James has done here would absolutely terrify me, so much respect to him for that. O'Brien distinguishes between "winning" an argument and having a more honest, productive exchange, and he lays out his own shortcomings over the years as an LBC broadcaster to provide evidence and context. The book has eight chapters, each of which dives into a singular issue or issues and shows transcripts of O'Brien fumbling the ball when talking to people on his program about issues he says he is "well meaning but ill informed" about. Probably I was most interested in the chapters on attitudes concerning traditional marriage because I too am susceptible to some of society's prejudices about wedded vs. nonwedded couples (though I didn't realize it until I read the book), and O'Brien's admission of his own hypocrisy concerning meat eating is one I share as well. (Like him, my diet is a "work in progress.") The one issue, I think, he is careful to point out he's not completely sold upon is transgender rights, and his admission that he holds two contradictory points of view on the subject, and therefore must be wrong somehow (he isn't sure how yet) is fascinating to look at. (It's summarized a bit in the midst of this exchange he had with Piers Morgan last October, when the book came out.)The start of the book got me interested then it wandered off to his troubled mind and became a little tedious.

But as you move through the chapters, and you reflect on this cache of incompetents and fantasists it makes you feel angry. I get the fact that not everyone is made to be a fantastic leader but we should never accept liars and ‘faux patriotism’. During that tumultuous time his show became an oasis of sanity for many on the remain-voting left – here was someone, often with his head in his hands, pointing out the damage we were about to inflict on ourselves, in a way that other media outlets seemed bizarrely afraid to do. His forensic 2014 interview with a clearly unprepared Farage was a masterclass in how to dismantle a phony persona in under 20 minutes. “I get thanked out and about, and people can get emotional,” O’Brien says. “Sometimes they say, ‘Your show was the only place where what I could see as reality was being accurately described.’ And that’s what I’ve tried to do in the book.” How James O'Brien became the conscience of liberal Britain". www.newstatesman.com. 3 February 2017 . Retrieved 2 August 2018. These are the people at whom the book is primarily aimed – not Westminster anoraks but the politically curious who realise something has gone badly wrong in this country but haven’t fully joined the dots. “Something’s broken in Britain, and what it is is the fundamental relationship with objective truth,” says O’Brien. “So I hope this book becomes some sort of Rosetta Stone, or at least a compass to navigate the oceans of bullshit.” Given the endless crises and scandals that have occurred over the past half-decade or so, it’s easy to forget some of the squalid behaviour that went on. How They Broke Britain, then, feels like a useful document to have – O’Brien’s scathing voice provides a thorough record of the self-serving actions and pronouncements of those who have held power in Britain.James O'Brien pledează pentru importanța schimbării opiniilor, insistând că degeaba ai o minte dacă nu ești dispus să o folosești pentru a-ți reconsidera propriile convingeri. James O'Brien on changing the mind of his toughest opponent yet: himself". www.penguin.co.uk. 22 October 2020 . Retrieved 16 June 2021. I don't want to sound like a biggot in talking about snowflakes articles and saying books that cover their subjects are guttural, but I just want to criticise publications that use them and *do not properly analyse it*, otherwise it just creates mis-information – It's no news then that a media veteran creates mis-information... I binged this book in about a day, and it's definitely one of my new favorite books. I love reading books about the flaws in my thinking, and understanding the psychology behind this has helped save my life. I'm a recovering drug addict, and my big "Aha!" moment was when I realized that I wasn't the smartest person on earth and that I might just be wrong about the way I was living. This is why I love this book from James O'Brien. Most of the books like this (like the one I'm currently writing) explain the psychology behind different biases and heuristics, but this book caught me by surprise because it's about James reviewing how he was wrong about different topics like racism, mental health, obesity and much more.